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Finding Frugal Toulouse, Despite Two Holidays

By Seth Kugel May 14, 2013 2:39 pmMay 14, 2013 2:39 pm

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Musée des Augustins in Toulouse, France.Credit Seth Kugel

Some are unlucky in love, others in business. I am unlucky in calendars. Wherever I travel, local holidays materialize from thin air – shutting down attractions, slowing down public transport and sending the locals fleeing to country homes.

The latest unwanted holiday was in Toulouse. I planned a quick trip from Barcelona (three hours by train, six by bus), allotting 75 euros ($95.35 at $1.27 to the euro) to spend over 24 hours in France’s fourth-biggest city. Toulouse looks like a tourist haven – churches, museums, a tangle of medieval streets – but the hordes are actually more likely to be university students, probably a bit rowdier but otherwise more agreeable company.

I booked a “single room without window” in the Hotel des Ambassadeurs for 40 euros, via its Web site. That left 35 euros for a day in a relatively cheap city: entry to Les Abattoirs, the well-regarded modern art museum, is only 7 euros; Toulouse’s bike-sharing system costs 1.50 euros for 30 minutes (you are charged slightly more if you keep a single bike for more time, or you can switch bikes); and many of its nicer restaurants offer “plans du midi,” weekday lunch specials often for half the price of the dinner prix fixe. For dinner, I’d stock up on bread, local sausage and cheese at one of the city’s celebrated markets.

Alas, the only full days I could spare were last Wednesday or Thursday — the same days the French were to celebrate V-E Day and the Feast of the Ascension. (Good days for Europe and Jesus, bad days for me.) Many attractions closed and plans du midi vanished, if the restaurants stayed open at all.

But by now I know the routine: briefly curse your luck, then regroup. Restructure with what’s left, be flexible — and see the bright side: although streets are emptier, residents who stick around are at leisure, perhaps with more time to engage.

Another bright side: a room upgrade. Dropping my bags at the Hotel des Ambassadeurs, Mathias Forest, whose family owns the place, told me things were slow – located near the train station, the hotel is largely dependent on business travelers. Renovated by Mr. Forest’s family over the last decade, it has an elegant 1872 spiral staircase, and was comfortable and problem free. And now I had a big window that peered down a side street of lovely 19th-century buildings.

(Visitors looking for a more central location should book at Hotel du Taur right off the Capitole square, a bit fustier but amazing for the price: singles from 59 euros; doubles from 69.)

The bike-share stations are everywhere, so I picked up a bike near the hotel (keying in a code paid for in advance at velo.toulouse.fr) and began looking for an open boulangerie in the old center. I found one on the third try, Maison Bernard (Rue Gambetta 35), and bought a hefty almond croissant for 1.70 euros and a baguette for later at 1 euro. I circled the city center on a scouting mission to see if any restaurants on my list were open and affordable. The answer was no, but the skies were blue, the temperature 70 degrees and the old city felt lived-in instead of museumlike.

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Canal du Midi.Credit Seth Kugel

Which is not to say I’m anti-museum. I was happy to find Musée des Augustins, the city’s fine-arts museum, open. Housed in a 14th-century Augustine monastery, its exhibition halls set around an arched cloister whose garden was aflame with orange poppies. The halls were the perfect setting for Gothic sculpture and medieval epigraphy and lovely for 19th-century painting (Delacroix, Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec) as well. A very worthwhile 4 euros.

Lacking a restaurant option, lunch would be a picnic, so I hoped I’d find the Victor Hugo market open to stock my backpack. It was, though some merchants had closed. “In Toulouse, one does not often go the supermarket,” Mr. Forest had told me, and here was proof: the market was mobbed. Old and young jockeyed for position, pressing butchers on how dry the sausage was and begging cheese mongers for just the right chèvre for heating and using in a salad. I was delighted – but also nervous. It’s been two decades since my last French class, and I don’t think we ever role-played a cheese transaction.

I resolved to patronize the less-frequented shops, figuring that any loss in quality would be made up for by unrushed attention. It worked: at Charcuterie Chez Christelle, a woman (Christelle herself perhaps?) sold me a perfect little chunk of peppery Toulouse sausage for 1.59 euros. At Crèmerie Breteille I managed to tell the unrushed saleswoman that I wanted a cheese that was very strong, inexpensive and good. She gave me a taste of eyebrow-raisingly sharp Bethmale Fermier (“the strongest we have”) and sold me a sizeable chunk for 2 euros.

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Gariguette strawberries at the Victor Hugo market.Credit Seth Kugel

At the fruit stands, I needed no such guidance. Everyone in the long payment line held 2.90-euro cartons of slender, elongated gariguette strawberries. They were in season, a woman waiting in line in front of me said, before insisting I not leave the neighborhood without strolling down the block to Xavier, the city’s nationally renowned (and, I assumed, outrageously expensive) cheese shop.

Well, O.K., just to nose-browse. It was expectedly marvelous: elegantly displayed cheeses, this one arrestingly slate gray, that one a dead ringer for a moldy burrito. I asked for a creamy, inexpensive option and was rewarded with 3.35 euros’ worth of a ewe’s milk Coeur de Palinet from nearby Albi, which I stowed away in my backpack, perhaps for a dinner dessert.

I picked up another bike road along the (not particularly bike friendly) Canal du Midi to Compans Caffarelli park, full of families. I set myself up in the Japanese Garden and unapologetically dove into my absurdly stereotypical tourist-in-France picnic of bread, cheese, sausage and fresh strawberries, none produced outside the Languedoc-Roussilion region. My 7.50-euro feast could have served two, so I packed the remainder in my backpack for later.

I headed across the river and toward Musée des Abattoirs, housed in a cavernous old slaughterhouse and best known for housing Picasso’s unusual stage curtain, “Body of the Minotaur in a Harlequin Suit.” But first, I made one last-ditch restaurant stop: Chez Raymond, rumored to be a low-cost redoubt for the Toulouse retired set. I almost couldn’t believe what I read on the menu: a 12.50-euro prix fixe that included four courses with wine, for lunch or dinner. Whoa. Not surprisingly, the place was jammed, and I asked if a reservation was necessary for dinner. Yes for two, no for one, they said: just show up early and they’d squeeze me in alongside some crusty locals. (Not their exact words.)

Picasso curtain time! “Seven euros, please,” said the man at the desk. “Ah no, pardon, it’s free.” My heart leapt. Perhaps V-E Day was Picasso’s favorite holiday? “We’re between exhibitions. There’s not much to see.” Not even the curtain, as it turned out — just a pleasant but ho-hum exhibition about the gallerist Daniel Cordier, and crates full of (probably lovely) art on its way out. As a substitute (and for just 2.50) I went to the nearby Château d’Eau, a photo gallery inside a 19th-century water tower that once supplied Toulouse’s public fountains.

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A local group called Nostalgérie, a combination of the French words for nostalgia and Algeria.Credit Seth Kugel

The space – two levels of doughnut shaped, brick-walled galleries – was beautiful, and I was enjoying photographs of a traditional Uighur neighborhood in Xinjiang razed by Chinese authorities. But what was that rank but familiar smell that permeated every corner of the place? I realized it was the leftover cheese in my backpack. Embarrassing, I guess, although I can’t be the first person in France to stink up a gallery with cheese.

Château d’Eau is adjacent to the riverside park called Prairie des Filtres, so I wandered over to the lush grass sloping down to the river and a view of the stately buildings lining the Quai de Tounis across the Garonne. It was full of young people variously kicking a rugby ball, kissing, dozing and playing guitar.

This should have been my picnic spot. Remorseful, I decided I could at least use the chance to taste my cheese from Xavier. It was so creamy I thought it had melted, and it tasted funky yet mild. I ate way too much of it, and then walked over to a group of young men strumming guitars, banjos and what I would soon find out was an Algerian mandole. They invited me to sit; it turned out they were a local group called Nostalgérie, a combination of the French words for nostalgia and Algeria.

Theoretically, I was due for the early sitting at Chez Raymond. But I was full from the cheese, exhausted from the day and cold from a late-afternoon drizzle. I could certainly use the euros I saved for drinks at Le Cherche Ardeur cafe, one of the few spots where cultural programming – free in this case – had not taken a break for the holiday; that night’s schedule included Lamine Cissokho, a Senegalese musician based in Sweden who played the harplike kora.

So I went back to the hotel to rest (and drop off my cheese for the sake of others); by 9 I was sitting at the bar at Cherche Ardeur, a warm place with whitewashed walls, stocked bookshelves and wine starting at 2.20 euros a glass and beer from 2.50. I had certainly not come to Toulouse to hear Senegalese kora music, but it was lovely and sounded (to my uninformed ears) like a cross between bluegrass banjo and a call to mosque. After the show, I found a nearby bike station and pedaled back to my room with a view, 74.52 euros spent.

Epilogue: My bus back to Barcelona didn’t leave until 2 p.m. the next day, so I showed up at Chez Raymond at a quarter to 12 to vie for lunch spot. I was directed to sit across from a solo woman several decades my senior – we were the third and fourth party squeezed into a table for six. I chatted, swilled the house red and stuffed myself with soup, boudin de viande, confit de canard made from the leg of a monster duck, coconut tart. Total cost: 12.50 euros. Lesson: don’t ever stay in Toulouse just one day, even if it’s a holiday.